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Your organization has custom templates in the woisd.net Google Drive Template Gallery. We’ve phased out this gallery. To help make your templates easier to organize, you can now create custom templates individually in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms. The old Template Gallery will be removed on or after February 15, 2017.

What you need to do

Before February 15:

You and your users should review the templates stored individually in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms. For details, see Use your work or school template gallery.
If any templates that you need are missing, submit the templates. Any administrator can update template categories in the Google Admin console. Organizations with G Suite Business (formerly Google Apps Unlimited) can control who can submit and approve templates.
If I do nothing, what will happen?

Any users who try to access the old Template Gallery in Drive will be redirected to Docs and only see the templates that have been submitted.

If users bookmarked specific templates, will those stop working?

Bookmarked templates will continue to work, but we strongly encourage you to submit the templates so others can use them.

Can I control who submits templates for my organization?

Organizations with G Suite Business (formerly Google Apps Unlimited) can control who can submit and approve templates.

If you have additional questions or need assistance, please contact Google Support.

It’s been a few years since I posted the steps on how to setup student Chromebooks to utilize Google Drive offline without the Internet. Below is a video that shows the steps with the latest menu updates from Google.

This is the quick way to do a one time backup of your files to Google Drive. It is not going to back up your programs. This will just store a copy of your files that you want to have a copy of saved elsewhere. (NOTE: If you prefer to constantly have your files backed up to Google Drive automatically, install Google Drive on your computer and start saving all of your content into the folder it adds to your computer. This will give you a copy on your computer and an exact duplicate on Drive.)

You have those times where you have lots of notes that were typed or handwritten and handed off to you. You wished they were in an electronic format so you can personalize them or edit them for other use. Google now has a way to help you out with that. Obviously, the handwriting portion depends on the quality of handwriting, but it will handle the typed text very well. Just use your phone, iPad, or computer to grab a photo and follow the directions below.

Thanks to the good folks over at the Google Gooru for this great tutorial video.

Doing collaborative work in Google is simple and very efficient. Say you are working with colleagues building PBL units or common planning documents and someone remembers they deleted a big section two days ago that they really wish was still there. Or, you are just monitoring Documents/Slides/Sheets being built collaboratively between students and one student says they have been adding content but somehow it is magically disappearing. Besides, it is great to know who is doing what work. What do you do? You use Revision History to see the living history of that item. This great video below will walk you through how it works and advanced options.

Anyone who knows me knows that I find a lot of value in Twitter. It has been my go-to source for connecting me with inspiring educators around the globe. I have learned from and with technologists in Australia, education department officials in Israel, design thinking teachers in Scotland, teachers and administrators across the North America, mentored student PBL groups in Oklahoma, and even discussed the State of the Union live with students from Philadelphia. Twitter is simply a powerful tool for learning.

WOISD staff have used Twitter to connect their students with authors, politicians, experts in other fields, and even a Holocaust survivor. Their lives have been changed and their learning improved because of a social media tool.

This video gives a quick testimonial on how one school district uses Twitter to make a difference in their classrooms. If you want to get started on Twitter, shoot me a note. If you start this school year modeling for our students how to utilize social media as a learner, you are helping them develop a valuable, lifelong skill.

Do you have a unit or lesson where students have to present a budget? They should give Google Sheets a try for that process. This short video gives you an idea as to how easy it is and what options they have with the data.